Dance teacher Martita Maderas imparts the passion, power and pride of flamenco.

"Dance has always been my nature.  It was my heritage, you know.  Never left my heart."
 Martita Maderas

She is so small to make such noise, this luciernaga, this firefly in high-heels.

Feet no bigger than a child's fiercely jackhammer the plywood floor, hands chatter with the song of hidden castanets.
A raw cry rises from her throat.

Outside, kids in dreadlocks and drifters in backpacks stroll past, casting a curious eye to the sounds that crackle within the walls of Bailar Dance Studio, a tiny, bare-bones establishment that has taken root along a well-trafficked stretch of North Blair Boulevard that pulses with a funky creative energy.  (Editor Note : The Bailar Dance Studio has now moved to a new location : Our Contact Information )

On the stoop, an impromptu drum circle rumbles to life - Caribbean rhythms that compete with the lusty strains of Spanish guitar and the blistering stomps reverberating within.

Inside the small studio, Martita Maderas moves like a flame.

Strutting before a mirrored wall, a partner to her own reflection, her eyes and arms speak an ancient language of protest.

At its heart, flamenco is a dance of survival.  And at 53, Martita Maderas is the teacher who leads the revolution.
"Hold up! Pull up!" She shouts, a wooden pointer tapping a slump here, a sag there.

Shoulders jerk back, chests heave up and out.  Ribs forklift toward the ceiling.  On these points of carriage, the teacher will not compromise.  This is a dance of pride.  She smiles.

"Feeel it," she urges.  "Feel this pride."

Behind her, bodies obey.  College kids, and career women and counterculture hippies.  Former ballerinas and professional belly dancers.  Their arms and hands stretch to mock Martita's sure, deliverate movements - carried along on demanding rhythms that ignite passions and make thigh muscles burn.

Even today, flamenco is a dance of mystery, its origins fiercely debated.

Hundreds of years ago, threads of dance were thought to have emerged amoung nomadic travelers and refugees - influences from as far away as Morocco, Egypt, India, Pakistan and Greece, fused with elements of Arab and Jewish music.

An elaborate artform today, the dance evolved, in part, from informal Gitan juergas (Gypsie parties) held in cves and camps in the Andalusian Mountains of Southern Spain.

Grown out of class oppression, flamenco came to represent a music, a dance, and a philosophy.  "Its power and despair emerged from the precarious and vulnerable lives of a people surviving for centuries at the margins of society," writes on music scholar.

So it seems fitting that flamenco has found a home here - a small, modest dance studio in Eugene's poorest neighborhood, where the new Gypsies gather.  Refugees to convention, they dance.

The scrapbook photograph is faded.  But the image remains vivid.  A 5-year-old girl stands on a rooftop overlooking Hell's Kitchen.  So long ago that only a few skyscrapers have yet stabbed the New York Skyline.  The year is 1949.  Eyes glow like coals.  Her dress fanned out in a saucy pose.
 Already she was dancing - drawn by the irresistible beat of the drums, the congas, she says, that would vibrate throughout the barrios of her Puerto Rican neighborhood.

On warm days, the sound swelled through open windows, bounced off concrete buildings.

When the music came, Martita vanished.  Later, her mother would find her little girl dancing in the street, gathering the coins that strangers tossed to her.

"Dance has always been my nature," Martita explained, sitting in the studio that she opened in the Whiteaker community only a year ago.  "It was my heritage, you know.  Never left my heart."

Her father and mother, a descendant of Arawak Indians, came over from The Island before she was born.  Her father was recruited to fight a war.  Her mother, to sew in the sweat shops of New York's burgeoning garment district.

Martita remembers her mother chanting in the kitchen, feet shuffling in a Caribbean trance dance.  During parties, her mother's voice: "Martita ven baila … Martita, come and dance."

Another photo.  Martita at 13, posed in a Spanish folks costume at the San Francisco Opera House.  By the time they moved west, she was finally big enough to take lessons.  First, ballet.  Then studying with those who knew the many intricate layers of Spanish dance: folk dancing from the countryside, Spanish classical, the Gitano/Gypsy influences.

Once you learned the music, the campas (beat), you find your own feeling for it - that's something nobody can teach you," she said. "It gave me a sense of control that was freeing to my spirit."

Clapping, rhythmic heelwork and castanets.  The body became its own instrument.  She liked that.

"Flamenco is really a dance of authority," Martita said.  "when you get up there, you're sort of telling the audience, 'HEY!'" she said, slamming a foot into the floor with all the power her 85-pound frame can muster.

"WAKE UP!  WATCH THIS!  I'M HERE!"

By high school, she had an agent and a nonstop schedule.  Talent competitions.  Cabaret gigs in nightclubs and hotels.  From community festivals to Folsom Prison, she danced.  When she was 17, the American Red Cross contracted with her to dance in camps and hospital wards.  Yellowed news clippings and grainy photos trace the exhausting, rewarding years.

Road shows.  State fairs.  Traveling acts.  Filling in with Spanish dance troupes that were bringing new flamenco to the Bay Area in the late 1950s, feeding a public appetite for a spicy Caribbean-Cuban-Latin American beat.  It was all so fresh, she remembers.

But the pace took its toll.

At 19, Martita had been dancing professionally for six years.  She knew more about stage lights than about senior proms.  With four contracts in hand, she suddenly stopped.  "I had outdanced myself," she said.

"AAAIII," Martita shouts in theatrical anguish.  Her long hair - spun into a hundred tiny braids - tubmles from beneath a scarf.  Dangling earrings flirt with the light.  Hands on hips, she studies her students, gently chiding them in a soft blend of Spanish and English.

"Que pasa?" she inquires.  :What are your fingers saying?  Let me see those pretty eyes work."

A hodge-podge of women slowly stalk about the studio.  A 47-year-old college professor.  A 23-year-old fine arts stidemt. skirt slung low beneath the curve of her pregnant belly, which has been bared from the late-afternoon heat.

One student is Asian.  Another was raised in Brazil.  And among their faces are the steady, dark eyes of Martita's daughters, 15-year-old Vanessa and 17-year-old Rose, drawn to the classes on their own.

"To me, this is a very jondo dance," Martita explains.  "What does that mean?"  Slow, tragic somber.  Their fingers are feathers in the wind.  Claps are soft and muffled.  Bodies sway in controlled tension.  In a moment, the mood changes into a playful electric energy that has teacher and students spinning, swooping and laughing.

"That baby's gonna turn out to be a flamenco dancer," Martita jokes, a nod to Sandy Wehling's swollen tummy.

The mother of nine, Martita knows about babies.   But even after marriage and babies, even after she had walked away from the stage, the dance never left her.  At home, she danced for herself, taught the children basic steps and posture to amuse them.

Her husband, David Maderas, is an artist and a musician.  "He saw me dancing and fell in love with me before I ever saw him," she said, with a blush and a shrug.

Together, they delivered all of their children.  Seven boys and two girls.  And every one a musician, a performer.  "We didn't start a family," she jokes.  "We started a band."  Their family actually has toured as a band and as a Caribbean dance troupe.  This month, they're cutting a CD.  Most of them still live together near Cheshire.  Their closeness seeps into the studio.  Her son, Jaime, plays Spanish classical guitar for her classes.  At any time, one of her children is sure to be there.

"It's really a joy to see music happening in an intergenerational line," said carol Silverman, a University of Oregon associate professor of anthropology and folklore, who studies flamenco and Spanish dance with Martita.
"Her sons, her daughters, their children … I can tell that their lives are respectful and integrated with each other.  And that music is the thing that holds them together," she said.

Students come to the studio from many paths.  Some, like Silverman and Tracie Manso, have studied flamenco before, but found no classes until Martita offered them.  Others have virtually no dance training.  All are welcome.

"I started taking classes years ago back in Chicago," said Manso, 40, a UO computer technician.  "I thought it was a beautiful, expressive dance form.  Because it came from the Gypsies, it resonates something within me.  It's not just steps, it's attitude," she added.  "The pride, the joy of it.  The expression of emotions.  That attracts me.  Emotions are not always valued in our culture.  But this form of dance allows you to come out with your rage, your pain, your sorrow.  You can really be alive."

"You have to put your soul into it," agreed Sandy Wheling, nodding.  "That's where the dance comes from - a rich, painful heritage."

That raw, emotional intensity has proven a universal drawing card.  Browse the internet and you'll discover flamenco workshops offered from Birmingham, England to Bellingham, Washington.  Order flameco footwear directly from Spain.  Sigh up to enroll at a flamenco dance academy in San Antonio.

You can subscribe to a German flamenco magazine, a newsletter from South Africa or check out an online flamenco magazine produced in The Netherlands.  Radio stations from Rapid City, S.D., to Wilmington, N.C., carry weekly flamenco music programs.

Few of Martita's students can claim a Gypsy or Spanish heritage.  But she feels no qualms about sharing the culture.  First comes interest, Martita reasons.  Then understanding.

And she's just grateful that people are curious.  "Even to this day, no one hardly knows what flamenco is," she said, chuckling.  "You ask them and they say, 'A bird who stands on one foot.'"

Martita likes to look at this studio as a cultural melting pot, a United Nations of dance.  She deliberately chose to rent studio space in the racially and economically mixed Whiteaker neighborhood - even though the location did raise some eyebrows.  "I heard people say, 'Oh, you're not going to do well there because it's a bad part of town.'  I've had other teachers call and say, 'Oh, I would rent your studio, but you know, how safe is my car at night?'"

She laughs the hearty laugh of someone who has seen worse.  "My kids love it.  The feel free here, not looked down upon."

"In fact, I wish we could throw a big block party down here, a giant juerga and invite the whole community and show them that people, after all, are people."

She can't jump as high as she once did.  The rapid-fire footwork, she insists, has slowed a bit.

Photos from childhood are folded into the past.  And that's fine.  "We all come here to get old," Martita says with a shrug.  "But I figure if you have something that you can put out there, you're going to be more sad if you don't put it out there than if you keep it hidden away," she said, shaking her head.  "That ain't gonna' make you happy."

Here, in the plainest of dance studios, Martita is happy.

Outside, the roar of cars and the rumble of a nearby construction project.  The thick scent of patchouli floats by.

Inside, her joy illuminates the room.

"Oya, oya," she cries, face twisted in an exquisite compromise of pleasure and pain.

"Listen to the guitars.  Listen to the campas."

Once again, the firefly burns bright.
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This article is typed from the Sunday, June 29th, 1997 article in Oregon Life, pages F1 and F2.
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